Rebecca Joynes is currently serving a six and a half year prison sentence
A teacher who was convicted for having sex with two boys, becoming pregnant by one, has been banned from the profession.
Maths teacher Rebecca Joynes, 31, was jailed for six and a half years in July last year after being found guilty of six counts of sexual activity with a child, after sleeping with one pupil before falling pregnant by a second while on police bail.
The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) convened earlier this month via a virtual hearing, which Joynes did not attend, to consider her professional conduct. A panel recommended she be banned from teaching.
I see where you are coming from, but I disagree that there is no difference. Apart from ages of consent being different among different countries (greetings from a place where you can have sexual relations from 14 years onwards), which already points at a grey zone for an age of maturity, I would ague that the physical and mental damage is different. A 15 or 16 year old might already have had some sexual experiences, or will have at least heard of what sex is, and (more or less) understand what is happening. The younger the child, the greater the damage to the body, and a child that doesn’t even know what sex is yet will carry a different kind of mental trauma from the assault.
I’ll also include the mandatory paragraph about a philia not being a felony in itself. Why it’s important is not just out of respect and support for non offending minor attracted persons who will be less likely to come out and seek help with a witch hunt for people with their orientation, but also to raise the absolutely necessary awareness that a great chunk of minor sexual assault cases are committed not by people with a -philia, but by people with regular (i.e. adult) sexual orientations. So you are not safe just because the person in question is proven not to have an attraction towards minors.
It’s funny how we spent the whole last decade stating that language matters, but somehow when it comes to pedophilia, everyone stops caring about correct language.
Glad someone gets it.
Boggles my mind that my post about needing to protect children got downvoted.
Glad yours is getting upvoted.
I’m glad you feel a bit supported, I was also very sad to see how your comment got so many downvotes. But unfortunately that is common on lemmy, I got tons of downvotes last time I argued that round.
the crime is still the same. rape.
you can tell me it’s a red car or a yellow car, and maybe the difference is relevant in some contexts, but not if we’re talking about someone running over minors with that car.
the difference makes sense in psychiatry, not legally. that difference makes no difference to the victim.
is it different raping a toddler than a 16 year old student? yes, is it still rape? yes.
I agree. It is still rape.
And yet we differentiate rapes in the legal system, or don’t we? We look at the circumstances. The whole debate here ensured because we brought the term pedophile into it. Even if you take the word in its wrong sense - as someone who is having [illegal] sex with a minor - you now specified the rape.
As in this case, it was statutory rape. As someone else pointed out, the second boy the teacher had sex with was 16, which is the age of consent in the UK. So if he was a student at another school, and she had had sex with him, she would be legally in the clear - no crime and no pedo. So now her being a pedophile or not depends on the school the boy is going to? Had she been a teacher at a school in Germany she could have legally had sex with both boys, provided they weren’t in her class. Yet what she did was illegal and statutory rape. You’re unnecessarily bringing pathological attraction into a rape case.
I’d also argue that motive matters. Is she attracted to younger boys only? Or does she get off on the fact that they are her subordinates? This matters for prevention.
I don’t know about the way sentencing in the UK works, but I sincerely hope that a person who rapes a 10 year old gets a harsher sentence than someone who committed statutory rape with a 16 year old.
In your car metaphor - she drove the car into people. Does this make every car driver a murderer in the making? And are motorcyclists in the clear because they cannot drive a car into people?
you lost me there, the point of the metaphor is that while some attributes are relevant in some context, it is irrelevant here. That teacher had sex with minors. that is rape and a big no no, if it was his teacher then the age of consent is 18.
and honestly, the walls of text defending the difference between tiers of being a nonce is quite sus. No one spends that much energy defending pedos unless they are one or you are their lawyer,.
Every goddamn one of these threads someone tries to discuss what it means to rape or to be a paedophile, and someone calls them a paedophile. We have criminal law because we, as a society, decided that some things are bad. We have different words for different crimes because, as it turns out, not every crime is the same. Manslaughter isn’t first degree murder. Theft under $5000 isn’t theft over $5000 because one is worse. Rape at knifepoint is not only arguably worse, it’s definitively worse than statutory rape. No one said any of these crimes aren’t “A big no no.”
Yep. And most unfortunately, as my (now mod-removed) original reply alluded to, prohibition does not prevent, making the good things bad and the bad things worse. Worsened further yet by the conflation and false equivocation.
As the key line from my original reply explicitly concludes: